Control Windows 8 Apps with TouchOSC and without a router

Having control over your workspace is probably the most basic but not always the most trivial demand. Ever thought about having a MIDI/OSC-controller on your phone? Most popular apps to do so are Liine’s Lemur or Hexler’s TouchOSC. Both applications are modular OSC and MIDI control surfaces for Android- and iDevices to control Windows and OSX programs (and even Linux, check here). They allow to remote control and receive feedback from any soft- or hardware that implement the OSC or MIDI protocols.

BUT: Available on the market for some years with ever changing OS interfaces, a cross-platform controller connection remains hard to achieve: It seems to be super complicated to connect TouchOSC in Windows 8 without a router (which you probably won’t have access to at xyz venue).
So here comes our Visual Society six-steps-TouchOSC-Windows-8-without-router walkthrough!

TouchOSC is a system of three apps that you will have to install:
– TouchOSC mobile app for Android or iOS.
– TouchOSC Bridge for OSX or Windows to send and receive Open Sound Control messages over a Wi-Fi network using the UDP protocol, supporting both CoreMIDI and the Line 6 MIDI Mobilizer interfaces for sending and receiving MIDI messages.
– TouchOSC Editor for OSX or Windows to create and edit your own custom control layouts and to upload custom layouts from computer to mobile device.

To make a connection both devices have to be connected either to the same wifi-router network or directly through an ad-hoc-wifi network set up on the computer. Unfortunately UI support for ad-hoc-networks was dropped by in Windows 8, 8.1, 10, which makes it necessary to set up the ad-hoc-network via command console / cmd:

How to set up TouchOSC in Windows 8 with CMD
1.) disconnect your computer from any wifi host networks
2.) Type into Windows search bar: „cmd“
3.) right-click and run cmd.exe as admin
4.) in console type: „netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=VisualSociety key=visualsociety“ (key must be 8-63 characters long. This network will be saved to your internet settings)